On the positive side, I continue to be confident in our ability to further drive and maintain cost discipline. By the end of this year, we will have realized over $4 billion of cost synergies and we will have already implemented initiatives to deliver more than $5 billion through 2024 and beyond, as I have detailed in the past. Second, with our strong cash generation, significantly reduced leverage, the outstanding results our games business has delivered, the turn to profitability of our streaming business, and the clear value in our ability to drive franchise returns across the company, we see more and more opportunity for investing in sustainable profitable growth. As David alluded to and as we shared with you over the last quarter, as we are planning for 2024, we are examining ways to reinvest at a slightly faster pace into these growth avenues.
This will be most relevant in areas such as marketing support for Max in the U.S. and in conjunction with launches in Latin America and EMEA, including new markets, particularly given the high profile release schedule Casey has assembled and the Olympic Games in Paris next summer. Our disciplined framework centered on rigorous analysis of subscriber acquisition costs, customer lifetime value and return on investment will firmly guide this process and support continued traction and revenue growth while maintaining our focus on longer term segment profitability targets. On the challenging side, it is becoming increasingly clear now that much like 2023, 2024 will have its share of complexity, particularly as it relates to the possibility of continued sluggish advertising trends.
To that point, while streaming advertising remains robust, the state of the overall linear ad market during the second half of this year has been disappointing. And looking ahead, while it is early, the timing of an ad recovery is currently difficult for any of us to predict with any conviction. And finally, as we begin to formulate the initial framework of our TV production business getting back to work into 2024, there is simply a lot we don’t know yet. While we have every confidence that this will eventually ride itself throughout the next year and there should be an eventual tailwind from the end of the work stoppage, this is an evolving process and there is a real risk at this point that some negative financial impact of the strike will extend into 2024 to some extent.
Here’s what these factors mean as we look ahead. We will exit 2023 with great momentum and leverage reduction. We have taken significant financial and operating risk off the table over the last year and we are fully committed to our gross leverage target range of 2.5 to 3 times adjusted EBITDA. That said, taking together the factors just mentioned for an early view on 2024, it is unlikely from today’s perspective that we will hit our target leverage range by the end of 2024 without a meaningful recovery of the TV ad market. We remain hopeful. Indeed, we expect to continue to generate very meaningful free cash flow. Key building blocks to consider for 2024 free cash flow remain #1 around $1 billion tailwind of cash cost to achieve largely going away, #2 lower cash interest expense and #3 further progress in AR and AP driven working capital initiatives, offset by the potential headwinds I’ve noted most importantly, a potential further decline in U.S. advertising and of course, the return to a normal content capital spend, as well as the incremental growth investments I noted earlier.
I remain very comfortable with our leverage and our delevering path as underpinned by the strength of our free cash flow conversion. Looking at our maturities over the next five years, the average amount of debt coming due is below $3 billion per year. Our debt stack is long dated and low cost with the nearly 15-year average maturity and a weighted average coupon of a little over 4.6%. With the vast majority of our remaining debt being fixed, we will be largely insulated from rising rates and in fact, we’ll have increasing opportunity to retire debt at a significant discount. As I stated at the beginning of my remarks, in a very compressed time frame, we have made very significant progress as an organization in what remains a very complex and disruptive period in the industry.
And our transformative efforts have better positioned us to compete, to respond to industry dynamics and to participate with strong operating leverage when the macroeconomic and at market backdrop eventually turned positive. And with the initial phase of integration work largely behind us and the free cash flow engine continuing to fire on all cylinders, we are more focused than ever on driving sustainable and profitable growth that will enhance the financial and competitive profile of the company over the next several years with real upside to shareholder value. Thank you again for your time this morning and now David, JB and I are happy to take your questions.
Operator:
Cahill:
Steven Cahill: Thank you. Good morning. So, David, you’ve now experimented a bit more with licensing, putting some shows on some major streaming partners from the HBO library. And I think you’ve successfully had licensing arrangements in the past such as the deal with Sky. So as you think about some of that really strong HBO content going forward, whether it’s library, whether it’s prior seasons of shows that are returning like True Detective or whether it’s some of the franchise shows like Friends, how do you think about what should be on Max and what can be elsewhere, particularly when there’s partners that are willing to pay a lot and maybe have bigger reach than Max? And then you talked about the engagement that you’ve seen on Max from CNN and sports and Bleacher.
I’m curious whether you think that content sits on Maxwell and justifies the cost and on the sports side, where do you see kind of sports emerging into streaming over the long-term, is it an add on tier? Is it integrated? Are you interested in partnerships with other DTC sports services like we’ve heard from up here? Thank you.
David Zaslav: Thanks so much, Steven. Well, look we’re probably the largest producer of TV and motion picture content and we have one of the largest TV and motion picture libraries in the world. The good news is that on Max we’re getting to see what people use and we get to see where they go first, how much time they spend with it. And so we are in the business of monetizing content through Windows. There’s a lot of content that we see is just for us. This is content that people come to Max for and it’s important and it’s important that we distinguish the Max brand as being the highest quality brand in in this space. And really taking Casey’s content out, whether it’s White Lotus, The Last of Us, all the great hits that HBO is having, one of the great runs that are on Max and taking advantage of that.
